Find the Ghost Boy
by beb
Summary: The Extreme Ghost Breakers must die, and you're going to help me!" claimed the mad woman. "Over my dead body," Danny replied. "Exactly!"
1. Chapter 1

Sam Manson was picking through her salad, looking for one last little baby tomato when an especially decrepit car squealed into a parking space outside the Nastyburger restaurant. It was a antique Chevette hatchback, half red and half duct tape and bondo. The driver's door creaked open and a familiar person got out and paced towards the door.

Tucker Foley, sitting across from Sam, looked up from his Double Nasty with mushrooms long enough to see who it was and muttered, "wrong Fenton" before stuffing another bite into his mouth.

Sam noted the lack of make-up on Jazz Fenton's face and the subtle disarray of her red hair. "Something's wrong," she told Tucker. He looked up again, checked out the rest of the diner but couldn't see what Sam was talking about. He was about to say so when Jazz reached their table.

"Have either of you seem Danny?" she asked.

"He was supposed to met us here," Tucker said.

"You haven't seen him at all today?"

"No. Why?" Sam asked.

"He was supposed to help me this morning but he was gone."

"You try his cell phone?" Tucker suggested.

"Of course I tried his cell phone. All I'm getting is 'Out of Service'. That's not like Danny. I'm worried."

"It's nothing," Tucker declared. "he'll show up sooner or later."

"He was supposed to met us here," Sam reminded Tuck. "I can imagine him ditching helping his sister but I can't imagine him ditching us!"

Jazz abruptly sat down next to Tucker and rubbed her hands over her face. "Something's wrong. A sister knows these things!"

"Really?" Sam asked skeptically. As an only child she knew nothing about life with brothers or sisters, still she doubted that sisters knew when brothers were in trouble because that would mean boys knew when their sisters were in trouble and Danny had always been especially clueless about his sister.

"Of course. I'm very sensitive about such things."

Tucker looked from Sam to Jazz and back. He decided from Sam's stony face that laughter was not called for. "Well, he does have a lot of enemies..." he suggested.

"Exactly," Jazz agreed. "That's why we've got to find hm."

"He'll be real ticked off if we have a full scale panic when he's just down at the arcade playing video games," Sam said. She pulled out his cell phone and dialed Danny's number. After a moment she went "humph!" and put it away. "'Out of service.' OK, let's split up and check out the places where he might be. Tucker you check out the arcade. I'll check the library and Jazz,

"Library?" Tucker and Jazz asked simultaneously.

"Danny's been known to go there to read up on ghost history."

"Danny reading? Why wasn't I informed of this?" Jazz wanted to know.

"Maybe he thought your sibling sense had told you already?" Sam suggested. "Anyway, Jazz, you check out the places where he might have gone this morning if he were doing other chores."

"What do you mean?"

"The grocery store, drug store, post office. Places your parents might have sent him. Let's met back here in an hour. Tucker! Don't play any games, just ask if Danny has been around this morning. One hour! Remember it!"

Tucker wrapped up the remains of his sandwich and stuck in his backpack then hurried off. Sam found a lost slice of cucumber, stuffed it in her mouth before bussing the table and hurrying out to her scooter. Jazz staggered back to her car which started on the third try and pulled out of the lot with much roaring of engine and grinding of gears.

***

Danny woke to a raging headache. It felt like the back of his head was split open. He reached back and felt a large and sticky lump on his skull. Pulling his hand back he saw covered in gooey red. Blood. How'd he hit himself on the head, and where was he?

Danny looked around with blurry, watering eyes. He seemed to be in some large, darkened room filled with vaguely familiar looking equipment. A small light was directly overhead. He was sitting on a hard and very cold floor, leaning against something equally hard and cold, and curved. He blinked several times hoping to drive the blurriness from his vision but that didn't seem to help. With a deep breath he began to get up off the floor when he noticed that he was completely naked.

"Hey!" he shouted and jumped up. The shout rang in his ears and the suddenly movement filled him with an intense nausea. He froze in place for a moment, waiting for the feeling of sick to pass. He was bent over with his hands crossed in front of his crotch for modesty.

After a moment, realizing that no one seemed to be around, Danny finished standing up, placing his hands on the sides of what appeared to be a glass cylinder for support. The cylinder was about three feet wide and eight feet tall. It stood in a nest of instruments of some sort about knee high off a cement floor. The base of the actual tube, though, was metal, stainless steel or something with a small grating in the middle, like a shower drain. The top of the tube was also metal, but it had a small grating where a light shone through next to another grating where fresh air seemed to be coming from.

Danny pounded on the side of the tube, shouting for someone to let him out. The tube gave no sign of breaking under his assault, nor did anyone come in response to his hollars. It just made his head hurt worse than it already did, something he didn't think was possible. He leaned against the glass tube, resting, his forehead pressed against soothingly cold glass. He looked more closely at the material spread around the room. He could make out two more glass tubes apparently under construction. One didn't have a cap on the top. The other had a cap but only some of the hardware he could see around his cylinder. After a time he realized why so much of the material in the room looked familiar. It was stuff like in his parent's lab -- ghost research material. He tried to think. Had his parents ever mentioned anyone else with an ectoplasmic research lab in Amity Park? He didn't think so. It was hard to think because of his headache, tho. In fact he couldn't recall how he got here, where he had been when he had been attacked, who had attacked him or anything. In fact he wasn't even sure what was the last thing he could recall.

Thinking back he seemed to recall that he was supposed to do something with Sam and Tucker today, but what? He wasn't even sure if this was Saturday or not, though he had a vague sense of going to bed the night before. But he couldn't recall what he had for supper, or the TV he watched that night or anything. The last thing he really could recall was Mr. Lancer standing over him, graded test in hand, telling him how disappointed he was in Danny's grade. How he know that Danny could do some much better if he only applied himself. And that if he didn't work hard to get good grades now he's never get into college or make anything of himself later in life.

Danny was pretty sure he'd gotten that lecture on Thursday, two days ago, but he could be wrong since it was the same lecture he got from all of his teachers at one time or another. They all thought more higher of himself than he did. They all thought he could be a genius like his sister, Jazz, but Danny knew better. He tried as hard he could all the time. He never tried to flunk a test, it just came naturally to him.

"This must be what having a concussion is like," he thought. Then wondered if he would ever get his memory back.

He beat on the glass wall some more before stopping with a grimace of disgust. "Stupid, stupid," he muttered as he changed into Danny Phantom. Why beat on the cylinder when he could just walk through it. The change was over in a flash but when he tried to slid through the material he bounced off it just as he had when he had been mortal. He tried passing through a couple more times with no better results. Danny floated up to the top of the tube but found that the metal there was as resistant to his ectoplasmic form as the glass. The floor, too, was ghost-proof. Danny began to feel worried. OK, it was weird enough to be kidnaped and stuffed into some kind of giant test tube but a ghost-proof test tube? Nobody in Amity Falls knew he was a ghost except for Sam, Tucker and Jazz. No one in Amity Park, or anywhere in the world would have reason to stick him in a ghost proof test tube.

Danny changed to his mortal form while he thought some more/

Plasmeus! Vlad Plasmeus, aka Vlad Master, the world's richest man, knew of Danny's dual nature, and often plotted his demise but this didn't look like Vlad's technology and he couldn't resist gloating. Why wasn't he here gloating?

But if it wasn't Vlad who could it be? Who else knew his secret?

Danny slumped down to the floor of the cylinder as he considered that. While he was sure no one else knew his secret, he had no end of enemies who wished him dead. Ghosts, mostly, who didn't like how he would capture them and send them back to the Ghost Zone. But none of this felt right. Skulker, the self-declared greatest hunter in the Ghost Zone would have just stalked him like a beast. Ember McLain would have tried to hypnotize him with music. Klemper would have just asked to be his friend....

Danny must have dozed off because he awoke with a start from the sound of a door slamming in the room. Lights flickered on as a figured stalked across the floor to stand in front of him. Danny crossed his legs and covered his naked self with his hands. "What's the big idea?" he shouted. "Let me out of here!" but the figure completely ignored him.

The person was dressed in a bulky, pale blue hazmat kind of outfit, one that covered face as well as everything else. Danny couldn't tell if it was a man or a woman standing there with a clipboard on which it was jotting down various reading from the instruments surrounding his tube.

Danny continued to shout and beat on the walls of the tube to no avail. After several minutes the figure went "Hmmm, ectoplasmic activity." The tone was pitched in a mid-range that could either be a boy or a girl.

"Hey, talk to me," He shouted. "I can hear you, you know. Don't pretend that you can't hear me."

His captor finally looked up at him. The visor in the large helmet was tinted so he couldn't see in. After a moment he, she or it, turned away and walked back towards the door.

"You can't just leave me in here!" Danny shouted and throw himself at the side of the glass cylinder. He throw himself back and forth as hard as he could in the confined space and was gratified to feel the cylinder rock just a little bit. Maybe if he kept this up he could topple the tube over and be free.

A pinging from the instruments clustered around the bottom of the tube brought his captor to a halt. He or she came back to the tube and changed a control. The next time Danny threw himself at the side of his prison a sharp electric shock ran through his body. He collapsed to the floor of the tube gasping.

"Behave." the costumed person said and started to walk away.

"Hey!" Danny shouted. "Can't you at least give me some pants?"

His captor turned around and announced, "You won't be needing pants," before finally turning off the overhead lights and leaving the room.

***

Mrs. Hemple, the head librarian at the branch office Sam and Danny frequented was a small, stout woman of about 70 years. Osteoporosis had left her with a profound "widow's hump" that made it hard for her to see who she was talking to anymore but she had never considered retiring because, as she said, "working in the library is what keeps me young."

Sam dropped a couple books in the return slot, the real reason she had for coming to the library, then sought out Mrs. Hemple. She was in the back reshelving some books. "Samantha," she called, refusing to use Sam's preferred name. Mrs. Hemple didn't like nicknames or women in pants, she was just old fashioned that way. "Do you enjoy that book on Van Gogh?" she asked.

"I did, thanks for recommending it. Say, I, uh, have a question: have you seen Danny Fenton around today?"

"Your young fellah," Mrs Hemple began, watching Sam's blush. With a chuckle at Sam's discomfort, she went on. "He hasn't been here today that I know of. I did see him in here yesterday. He wanted to read the newspapers from 1935 and '36."

"Right, there was a big haunting back there he wanted to look into."

"I suppose so, but really, I think he was mostly reading the funny pages. I heard hm laugh several times. Almost had to go back and shush him."

Mrs Hemple was trying to reach the top shelf with one of her books. Sam took it out of her hand and reached for the place she had been aiming for. Even she stood on tiptoes to slide the book into place.

"Thank you, dear," the librarian said as she handed Sam another book and pointed to where it was to go. The shelves weren't that tall but Mrs. Hemple was very short, easily the shortest woman Sam knew. Nor did she mind helping since she loved libraries as much as Mrs. Hemple did. This library had been built nearly a century ago with money from a Carnegie grant. It had a high vaulted ceiling, two long wings that ended with large stain glass windows. set over ornamental fireplaces. Well, they were ornamental today but according to Mrs. Hemple when the library had first been opened fires were lit in the hearths. Oak shelves lined the walls of the building with shoulder high free-standing shelves filling the inner spaces. A couple large round tables were set near the fireplaces as well as some badly sprung sofa chairs. Many people thought the library was old and decrepit but for Sam it was like a second home.

Sam pushed the last book into place and turned to the silver-haired old lady. "Well, if Danny isn't here I'd better go. He's missing and his sister is worried.

"That would be Jasmine. I haven't seen her around in a while. The next time you see her reminded her that we can get pretty much anything she wants through interlibrary loan."

"I'll remind her," Sam said, turning to leave.

"Wait!" Mrs Hemple called after her. "I just remembered something odd about yesterday. After your friend left a young lady asked me if I knew who he was. She seemed very interested in Danny. I don't know why."

"Did you tell her who he was?"

"Librarians are here to answer questions. Of course I did."

Sam stood there for a moment thinking. "What did she look like?"

"Tall, thin, youngish. Maybe in her twenties. She was wearing some of those awful tight-fitting low riding blue jeans and a short T-short, dark, like yours. Oh, and she had on large, very dark sunglasses. I thought it was very odd to be wearing sunglasses inside a library."

Sam asked a couple further questions but that was about the limit of Mrs. Hemple's knowledge about the strange woman. Sam thanked her and hurried back to NastyBurger to wait for her friends to return.

***

"I got the new high score on "Munch Munch Ka-boom," Tucker announced when he entered the fast food diner and slide into his spot opposite Sam.

"You were supposed to be looking for Danny,"

"Hey, I did that too," Tucker replied defensively. "The guy at the cash register remembered Danny coming in earlier this morning, around ten. He played Motocross for a while then left."

"Where'd he go?"

"How would I know?"

"He didn't say anything about having chores to do or anything like that?"

Tucker could see that Sam was pissed. Well maybe he could have investigated more instead of playing "Munch Munch Ka-Boom" but usually there was such a line up for it that he never had a chance to play. Today it had been free. How could he not take advantage of that? Sam never understood what games meant to him and Danny. Since nothing seemed like it would please Sam, Tucker decided not to say anything.

After a bit he got up and ordered some fries so he'd had something to do with his hands. He was just getting back to his seat when he heard the Jazzmobile squeal to a halt. Tucker didn't know much about cars, it wasn't in his area of interest, but even he knew that that car needed work done on it.

Jazz flopped down next to Sam and shook her head.

"I asked around the drug story, the supermarket, even talked to the old men down at the park, none of them remember seeing Danny this morning."

"Maybe he was never at home last night"

"He was home. We fought over the TV, as always. That kid could watch cartoons all day and night."

"Was his bed slept in?" Tucked asked, trying to remember the sort of questions the actors on CSI would ask.

"Have you seen his bed? It's a disaster!"

"Mrs Hemple at the library said some girl was asking after Danny. Know anything about that?"

"Danny with a girlfriend? That seems unlikely," Tucker said.

"Danny hasn't mentioned any one new in his life, other than you two. " Jazz said She sat with her head in her hands, looking back at the table glumly. "What a minute," she suddenly said. "One of the men down at the park said something about seeing a girl hanging around the park. She asked who had the big sign down the street. That would be us, of course. She must have been trying to pump those guys about Danny!"

The Fentons lived in a older brownstone rowhouse modified to be their corporate headquarters and laboratory as well as their home. It had a garish twenty foot tall sign in front that blinked "FentonWorks" day and night.

"Was she tall, thin, in tight pants with big sunglasses?" Sam asked.

"All I know if that she had big cans. Why can't men be more respectful towards woman?" Jazz sighed.

"A woman with big cans looking for Danny? That's what the cashier said!"

"What do you know about that, and why didn't you tell us about it before this?" Sam demanded with a fierceness that made Tucker glad there was a table between him and her.

"I didn't think it was important. I was asking if he had seen Danny and he said some girl was asking the same question."

"What was the girl like?"

"He just said she had - uh," Tucker paused and groped for the right word, considering his audience, "she was well endowed."

"That's it?" Jazz demanded. "What was the color of her hair? How tall was she? What was she wearing?" How soon after Danny left did she ask about him?"

"I don't know. I didn't think to ask." Tucker stammered.

"But he did make the high score on "Munch Munch Ba-boom," Sam added spitefully. Jazz growled.

"Let's head back to the arcade. Maybe knockers boy there can remember more about this woman." Jazz said, getting up. Tucker considered whether it was worth it making a break for the other exit. Having Sam and Jazz mad at him at the same time would not end well. But Sam was already pushing him ahead. His time for escape had passed.

***

The cashier at the video arcade was bobbing his head to the music he as listening to on his iPod when the three arrived. After shouting to get his attention they found that he had little to add to what he had already told Tucker. The girl had asked if that was Danny Fenton and if he knew where he lived, then had followed Danny out of the building. Yes, she was tall and thin. What was she wearing? He didn't recall. Had she been there before? He didn't recall. He guessed she was in her twenties, then recalled she had bright red, almost orangish colored hair and big freckles all over her face, almost like birthmarks or something.

They were heading back to Jazz's car when Tucker stopped and pointed to something down the street. "Come on," he called.

Three blocks away, in the direction Danny would have taken to walk to the Nasty Burger was an office building with a small plaza out in front. Parked at the curb was a small, silver paneled truck. One side was lifted up, revealing cases filled with plastic wrapped sandwiches, friut and cans of drink. A middle-aged man with a carpenter's apron tied around his waist stood beside it. He was taking money from some people holding sandwiches and drinks in their hands.

"Tucker, you just ate," Sam complained.

"No. Maybe the guy at that catering truck saw Danny or that girl."

They left the car where it was and followed Tucker down the street.

***

"Hey, Mister, I'm looking for a lady," Tucker asked when he got to the plaza.

The man was turned away, moving some of his stuff inside the truck. "You and me, both," he answered over his shoulder before turning to see who had asked the question. "Sorry, kid," he said. "I didn't mean to be rude. What can I do ya for? It's gotta be quick, tho. Econodyne lets out at One, and I got to be there. Lotta people want to pick up a bite on the way out."

"We really are looking for a woman," Jazz explained. "We think she kidnaped my brother and may have passed this way. Have you seen her? She's tall, thin, probably wearing tight pants, oh and has orangish-red hair."

"Shouldn't you be talking to the police if she kidnaped your brother?"

"The police won't take missing person claims until after 24 hours." Sam explained. "We don't think Danny has that much time."

"I wish I could help but I see lots of people all day, I can't remember them all."

"She has big cans," Tucker volunteered, then gasped as Sam rammed an elbow into his chest. "Behave." she whispered.

"Big -- uh, yeah, uh, sounds like someone I would have remembered if I'd seen her." He picked up a rack of potato chip packets and carried it into the open back door of his truck. He slammed that door, then removed the brace from one end of the side panel and let it slam shut. "Look. I hope you find your brother," he said, "I really do, but I can't help you."

"Yeah, we understand," Tucker said. "Thanks, anyway."

They turned and walked back towards Jazz's car. They'd barely got to the intersection when the caterer called, "Hey, kids, come here."

"I may have seen this woman you're looking for, after all." he explained when they got back to his truck. "She was walking across the street heading that way." He pointed in the direction away from the video arcade. "I didn't see her face or anything but she had a nice butt, big, you know." He stopped and blushed. "Kind of like you, with the orangish hair and all," he pointed towards Jazz.

"Excuse me, you think I have a big butt?" Jazz asked fiercely.

"Well, yeah. No, I mean. -- Anyway, she was walking on the other side of the street, and turned right at the real estate sign and that's the last I saw of her."

Jazz was left speechless. Sensing he had stepped in it, the caterer fled to the cab of his truck and got in and drove off.

"Tucker, what are you doing?" Sam whispered. Tucker had his head craned back looking at something behind Jazz.

"It doesn't look that big to me."

"This isn't about my butt." Jazz hissed through clenched teeth.

"I'm just saying around my family that wouldn't count as a big butt at all."

"Stop talking about my butt."

"I thought I was paying you a compliment," Tucker whined.

"Let's go back to the car," Sam suggested.

"My butt isn't big!"

"That's what I was saying," Tucker complained, "why is everybody down on me for saying that?"

He turned back towards the arcade.

"No, we're going to the real estate office," Jazz said and lead off the other way.

***

The real estate office was on the ground floor of a narrow two story building. It sat on the corner of the block and featured large plate glass windows looking both north and east. Extending south, beyond it, sloping down to the lakefront was a large area of factories and warehouses, now mostly closed and abandoned.

Jazz lead the way through the door. Inside the store was divided in two by a large, unoccupied secretary's desk. Chairs lined the walls in front of the windows. A table in the corner sported a pile of dog-eared magazine, the top one touting the 1998 new cars.

A bell had sounded when they entered and moments later a short, balding man came out from around a partition, a hopeful smile on his face. It wilted to a puzzled frown when he saw the three teen-agers in the waiting room.

"Can I help you kids?" he asked impatiently.

"We're looking for a woman who may have kidnaped my brother," Jazz began. "We know she went past here earlier today. We're wondering if she may be living in one of buildings in the industrial park?"

"Kidnaping? Shouldn't you be talking to the police," The short man asked in return.

""They don't taking missing person reports before 24 hours have passed." Jazz explained.

"But you say this is a kidnaping. I'd think they take that more seriously than just a missing person."

"There's no ransom note," Sam interjected, "so we can't prove that there's been a kidnaping. But if we can find the woman then we'd have all the evidence the police would need to come in and arrest her."

"But we just want to know a little about the factories in the industrial park. I assume you represent them?" Jazz added.

"Some," the balding man said. "Most. But how will this help you find this woman?"

"We think she lives here, so we're wondering if any of these building would be suitable for living quarters?"

Tucker leaned over to Sam, "When did we decide she lives here?" he whispered.

"Why else would she walk into an industrial park in the middle of the day?" Sam whispered back.

The realtor sighed, "These are factories. People worked there. They needed bathrooms and a breakroom, which would need some kind of kitchen facilities, plus whatever facilities the executives had so really, all of them would be suitable for living quarters though this area is not zoned 'residential' so it would be illegal to rent any of these building for living quarters."

"And she probably wouldn't tell you if she was going to live there either," Jazz thought out loud. "Have any of these buildings been rented in the last few months?"

"None that I represent, no. And if any had been rented I don't think that would be information I'd share with just anyone who walked in off the street. Now if you don't mind, I have work to do. Good-day." He stood there waiting for them to leave.

They stood outside on the corner for a moment considering their next move.

"Let's get the car," Sam finally suggested, "and cruise through the industrial park. Maybe we'll find something to indicate someone is living there."


	2. Chapter 2

They cris-crossed the industrial park for an hour. There were several false alarmed but each time what looked liked signed of recent occupation turned out to be dogs digging into months old trash. Finally they drove back to the Nasty Burger, ordered some soft drinks and sat around a table thinking.

"We should get a Fenton Finder and reset it so that it picks up Danny," Sam suggested. Danny had some time before modified all the ghost detectors the Fentons manufactured so that they would no pick up his unique ghost energy, in an effort to keep his parents in the dark about his having acquired ghost powers.

"We have a big phased-array detector in the Ops Room on the roof. I already tried using that to find Danny. Nothing. whatever she did to Danny, she must have him behind a ghost barrier.

"If he's still alive," Tucker said.

"How could you say that!" Jazz cried and broke into tears.

Sam called him a shockingly vulgar term before turning to comfort Jazz.

Unable to face his friends, Tucker pulled out his PDA and connected to the Internet. He was about to boot into one of his favorite games when a thought came to him. Pulling up a search engine instead he typed in a description of the woman and hit "go."

"What are you doing now," Sam asked in the sort of tone one uses for traitors and serial delinquents.

"I'm googling a description of the woman we're looking for."

"Do you have any idea how many women there are in this country who answer to that description?" Sam asked.

"Over ten million according to this search engine, but I think I can narrow that down a lot."

"How?" Sam asked with interest even though she was madder at Tucker than she had ever been in her life for making Jazz cry.

"We know she's tall, thin, and has red-hair..."

"And has big tits and an ass, yes we know."

"But she's also interested in Danny and that means there's got to be some kind of ghost connection to her as well. There cann't be that many tall red-heads interested in ghosts. Fifty Thousand hits! Oh, Good Lord...."

"Let me see that," Sam asked as she tore the PDA from Tucker's hands.

"Did you put in 'freckles'?" she asked as she flicked through pages of search results.

"Of course."

'Hey, this looks promising. Kat Bowen."

Jazz looked up. "I know her."

"Personally or professionally." Sam asked.

"I've met her but don't really know her. She's part of the Extreme Ghost Breakers team. I met her at a Ghost convention my parents took us to. Why would she be interested in Danny?"

"_Former_ member of the Extreme Ghostbreakers team," Tucker corrected. He had snatched his PDA back from Sam and was running a search on Kat Bowen. "It says here she quit the group about six months ago over 'creative differences'."

"Meaning what?" Sam wondered.

"Here's a report that she throw a drink at her colleague, 'Hog' Wylde at last years Ecto-Plasmic Enterprises conference."

"She drinks?" Jazz asked.

"She's 25," Tucker flipped back through several tabs to find her biographical information. "I guess she can drink if she wanted to."

"Does it say why she threw the drink?" Sam asked,

Tucker was silent for a minute. "Here it is. He called her 'dude'?"

"Dude?" Jazz echoed.

"Hey, remember when Vlad put that million dollar bounty on Danny's head,?" Sam said. "They were one of the groups trying to collect it, and I seem to recall that she was always complaining about them calling her a dude when she was a girl."

"She threw a drink because some guy couldn't tell she was a girl?" Tucker marveled

"She quit the Extreme Ghostbreakers because of that."

"But her partners were complete morons," Sam protested. "How could she take anything they said seriously?"

Jazz was daubing at her eyes with a napkin. She was looking confident once again. "In my studies," she said, "I've learned that people often settle on some minor grievance to hide the larger issues that are tearing them apart. Perhaps she saw their calling her 'dude' as a symptom of their greater disrespect for her because she wasn't a man like them. After all there were only three of them on the team and as Freud says, three is the minimum number needed to have one man out in a group.

"I think you mean Blue Man Group not Freud," Sam said, "but I know what you mean. So how do we use this to find Danny?"

They thought about that for a moment. Tucker had called up a picture of Kat Bowen and passed it around. She was a not unpretty woman despite the half dozen or more dime sized freckles on her face. Her hair was very orangish and kinky. In the picture she had combed it back and held it in place with a tie. She was laughing at something and held a drink in her hand. Dark sunglasses were perched in her hair and what could be seen of her T-shirt fit her like a glove. Jazz and Sam both nodded that this looked like the woman described as looking for Danny.

"I've looked through the on-line phone book and can't find a listing for her," Tucker said, nose buried in his PDA. "Nor is there any evidence that she's bought any land around here. It would be in the city deeds database. Water is public information and I can't find anything there. Electric is private and they don't have an on-line database of clients. The only mail address I can find is in Colorado but its at least a year old. There's no way to tell if she's in Amity Park."

"Check some of the celebrity tracking sites. See if she's been spotted in town?" Jazz suggested. "It looks like she likes to party. Maybe one of them has a line on her."

"Bingo!" Tucker exclaimed. "PartyHardyInThePark dot com has a photo of her from last month. She was dancing at the Industrial Club. Says she got thrown out for starting a fight. Wow, she's got issues."

"But what does she want with Danny?" Jazz wondered.

"Maybe she likes dating younger men?"

"Tucker!" Jazz and Sam exclaimed simultaneously.

"Well, maybe Danny called her a 'dude'?"

"I think she would have just kicked him in the groin and let it go at that." Sam said.

"The Industrial Club is our only clue," Jazz said, getting up. "We have to go there."

"Jazz, we're too young to get into a club like that and it's mid-afternoon. They won't open until 9 or 10. No one will be there now."

Jazz sat back down. "But we can't just wait around until there. Danny's in trouble I know it. We've got to do something."

"I agree with Jazz, but Sam's right, too," Tucker said. "This club is our only clue. The only thing we can do is stake out the club tonight and hope Kat isn't one of those people who stays until closing."

***

Danny was squatting on the floor. hours later, in the glass tube he was imprisoned in, trying to rest while not touching the electrified walls of the cylinder. He head continued to throb but there weren't the blinding flashes of pain when he moved he head like there had when he had first awaken. He wondered what Sam and Tucker would do when he didn't show up for lunch like he'd promised. He'd completely forgotten about his promise to help his wondered who his captor was and what they were planning to do.

Eventually the lights came on in the large room again and there was his captor, still encased in a full body hazmat suit, a clipboard in his hand. Danny noticed he was humming a song as he came in, but couldn't recognize it. When the song came around to the chorus his captor began a weird kind of complicated dance, flailing his arms, twisting around in a well-execurted spin and stamped his feet with a final _tada!_ before going back to recording the reading on the instruments as if nothing had happened at all. The thought crossed Danny's mind that this guy was nuts. Still that wasn't goign to get him out of this giant test tube any time soon.

"H-e-l-l-o!" he called out. "H-e-l-l-o! When are you going to let me go?" Danny wanted to get his captor talking in hopes of finding out what was going on but also because he just couldn't stand the silence any more.

The person in the baggy hazmat suit ignored him. From the tinted glass on the large bucket shaped helmet Danny couldn't even tell if he was looking at him.

"Why are you doing this. What do you want? Come on, mister, what have I ever done to you?"

"Mister!" his captor shrieked. "Mister!" He ripped off his helmet revealing a angry young woman with orangish-red hair, green eyes on a blazing red face with large, darkish freckles. "Do I look like a 'mister' to you!"

"Sorry, lady," Danny apologized, springing to his feet and trying to back away from the woman intense anger. Bumping against the wall of the cylinder caused a brief flash of electricity and Danny jumped back to the middle of the tube. "I didn't mean anything by it. It's just that .... in that suit and with your helmet on you could have been anybody, man, woman, green Martian. I'm sorry. What's the big deal, it was an honest mistake." Danny realized that he was babbling and shut up.

"Do you know who I am?" she asked.

Danny squinted. "You know I'm still a little concussed from when you hit me," he admitted. "Frankly everything still a little blurry. Should I know you?"

"I'm Kat Bowen!"

"From the Extreme Ghost Breakers?"

"Late! Late of the Extreme Ghost Breakers. Late of the soon to be Late Extreme Ghost Breakers!"

"You quit the group?" Danny asked, genuinely surprised. "When did that happened?"

"Last year! Doesn't anyone pay attention?" She began pacing the floor then tried to jam a hand into a pants pocket only to find the hazmat suit in the way. She fought with it for a moment, then ripped the zipper on the front down and tore off the suit. She was almost in a frenzy by the time she got the elasticized booties off her shoes. With a growl of rage she smashed her hand into her pocket, pulled out a small cylinder and placed it in her nose and snorted. She held her breath for a long ten count before exhaling contentedly.

"Are you OK, lady?" Danny asked, alarmed by her behavior.

"Better than you'll be in a little bit," she laughed.

"What do you mean by that?"

She didn't answer which Danny found to be very disturbing.

"What did I ever do to you?" Danny asked. He bumped against the side of the giant test tube again and got rewarded with another jolt of electricity. "Could you turn that damned thing off," he cried. "I can't turn around without getting shocked."

She looked at him for a moment, her lips curled up in a snarl. Them looked at the little inhaler still clenched in her hand. She raised it for a moment like she was going to use it again, then stuffed it in her pocket and made some changes on the control panel in front of Danny's prison.

"Have it your way," she said with a sigh. "As long as you don't trip the accelerometers the glass won't be electrified."

"Thanks." Danny took a longer look at his captor. She wore some kind of tight dark pants, ski pants he guessed because of the wide strip of greyish green down the sides. Her feet were stuff in fur-lined boots with short heels. And a half-buttoned red-check flannel shirt hung off her very thin shoulders. She had a kind of a pretty face, triangular shaped, with large greenish eyes, expressive eyebrows and a wide mobile mouth, but the eyes were burned under a ton of mascara and the way her lipstick attacked her face Danny wasn't sure if she was trying to look like the Joker or just didn't care.

Danny gingerly leaned against the side of his prison and when he found that he wasn't being shocked, learned into it, glad to be able to relax for the first time in hours. Except for the part about standing naked in front of a woman. He kept his hands across his front.

"So what brings you to Amity park?" he asked

"You."

"Me?"

"I need you for my revenge?"

"Against who?"

"My former team member, of course. That why I quit. I couldn't stand them any more. It was always 'dude, this' and 'dude, that.' I kept telling them I wasn't a dude but they never learned. I even flashed them my tits and they didn't care! "

"Maybe they were gay?"

"That I could have lived with!" Kat screamed. "But, n-o! They were so full of themselves that they never see anyone else! So they have to die."

"You're going to kill them? For calling you a 'dude'?"

"Yes! Well, you're going to kill them, that's why you're here."

"You're crazy! I'd never try to kill anyone!"

She smiled up at him, twisting her head to the side as far as it would go, baring her teeth a little. "Yes. I am - ever - so - crazy. But they still have to die."

"You know you're crazy? Isn't that a little crazy."

"Oh, yes."

"I mean...." Danny was floundering here. He didn't have his sister's background in psychology but there was something here that wasn't quite right. "if you know you're crazy, doesn't that mean you actually aren't?"

He saw that he had, for the moment, her undivided attention.

"I mean, isn't one of the characteristics of craze people that they don't know how crazy they are? So when you say you're crazy aren't you, like, admitting that you aren't. Crazy, that is?"

"The 'Catch-22' defense," she replied. "But if you really understand the book you'd know that the whole world is insane and there's no way out."

"It was a book? I thought it was a movie?"

"It doesn't matter, they have to die!"

"For not remembering you're a woman?"

"For a lifetime of insults! They will pay!" She suddenly pulled the inhaler out of her pocket again and took a hit. It seemed to calm her down.

"Couldn't' you, like, just beat them up a bit and call it quits? My friend, Sam, is quite a woman's libber. She's always hitting me when I say or do something sexist."

"The road not taken....Well, I'm glad she's exerting herself like that. But it's too late for them, for me. I have given this a lot of long, careful consideration. I have analyzed the situation using seven different forms of logical thought and it always comes back to the same point. They don't deserve to live!"

"Jeez, lady chill out." he muttered to himself. "So why did you kidnap me?" Danny demanded. "Did you need someone to confess your crime to? Why not save us all the trouble and go tell the police your plans."

"You're going to kill them."

"Like heck I am."

"I know all about you, Danny Phantom," she purred.

Chills went down Danny's spine. He could feel his whole back raise up in massive goosebumps while the pit of his stomach was rapidly falling towards China. "Fenton," he insisted. "I'm Danny Fenton. You've got me confused with someone else."

"No. You're Danny Phantom _and_ Danny Fenton. And I'm going to steal those delicious ghost powers of yours to kill my ex-partners. It's so delightfully ironic. They who have spent their, admittedly short lives, breaking ghosts will be broken by a ghost! And with they're dying breathes they'll know who did this to them. And that I'm a woman!"

She was shouting again. If they weren't in some large abandoned factory the police would have been here a long time ago on a noise complaint.

"They'll never recognize you as a ghost," Danny blurted out, then clamped his mouth shut. "Do I look like a ghost?" He asked a moment later. "I don't because I'm not a ghost!" Danny had always been afraid someone someday would recognize that he and Danny Phantom were one and the same. But he had always figured it would to his parents he would be making these denials.

"I don't know how you do it, but I intend to find out. Why else haul in so much equipment," Kat Bowen said, waving her hand at all the machinery laying around the factory floor, "but I know that you and Danny Phantom are one and the same. That's why I placed you inside a ghost-proof extraction cylinder. My sensors indicated that someone using ghost powers tried to break out of your cylinder shortly after you woke up -- from the inside! There's no mistake. You are a ghost and I am going to take those powers and kill my partners like I should have so many years before!"

Danny slowly slumped to the floor of the cylinder, the strength drained out of him by her announcement.

"After that disastrous Prize Contest by Vlad Masters to capture Danny Phantom I spent a lot of time analyzing what had gone wrong. There were my idiot partners of course, and the equally moronic Puzzle Patrollers, and the Guys in White -- what a waste of my tax dollars they are -- but how could Danny Phantom have eluded Jack Fenton for so long. The man is a moron, a buffoon, an idiot and a klutz...."

"That's my dad you're talking about!" Danny shouted.

"Yes, it must be very embarrassing to you." she continued. "But even with all his handicaps how could he fail to capture you, there had to be an explanation. So I've been in town for the last couple months researching you. At first I thought maybe you and he had some kind of deal where he was actually protecting you. For a time I thought he might actually be Danny Phantom. But of course I was wrong. Then I realized that the only people helping Danny Phantom were a couple high school kids -- whose only other friend was Jack Fenton's son! So I reevaluated all my data and discovered that Danny Fenton is always missing when Danny Phantom is around. Like Superman, they're never in the same room at the same time. I had to be sure, so I brought you here, and now I have incontrovertible proof that you tried to break out of that cell by using your ghost powers! Ha! ha! ha! ha! ha!" she kept on laughing for a full minute or longer.

"That's your proof?"

"It's enough, ghost boy! Tonight victory will be mine. All foes will lie at my feet. The world will know the power of Kat Benson -- Ghostgirl! Aha! ha! ha! ha! ha! How's my laugh, I've been working on it?"

"It sucks."

With a curse, the crazy woman stalked from the lab.

***

"See anything?"

Sam, Jazz and Tucker were sitting inside Jazz's car, parked next to a fire hydrant across the street from Industrial. The club was a two-story concrete building, a small warehouse converted to a dance studio. There were a number of security lights mounted around the corners of the building and along the fenced in parking lot to one side. The building was painted black with some white slashes for contrast and some graffiti long the sides. People milled around the door, not so much waiting to go inside as hanging out for fresh air.

"We should have come earlier, she might already be in there for all we know." Sam, in the passenger seat was tapping her foot nervously while Jazz, in the driver's seat, hogged Sam's father's big bird-watching binoculars.

"We got here an hour before the club opened. If we'd come any earlier it would have been daylight and we'd have stuck out like a sore thumb," Jazz whispered back, not taking her eyes from the big, swiss lens.

Tucker was in back with a pair of army surplus night vision goggles. Tucker had never had a chance to use the night vision goggles before and was relishing the chance. It was amazing how clear everything was, except since it had no light magnifying power all the crisply visioned people around the club were rendered as small green and white figures.

"What about you Tucker?" Sam asked since Jazz wouldn't give her her glasses back.

"Umm, I'm not sure how we're supposed to spot a red-head.. I'm not getting a lot of color here. Wait, something's happening."

Even Sam could tell that. A woman had just been thrust out of the club, followed by a guy that made Dash Baxter, Casper High All-Star Quarterback look small. Sam had opened the window on her side of the car. Since it faced away from the club no one was likely to notice the people inside the parked car. Through the window Sam could hear the woman screaming at the doorman. "F--- You! F---You! How dare you throw me out. Do You Know Who I Am?"

"I've had it with you, Kat," the bouncer yelled back, if oly to be heard over the woman's non-stop cursing. "I've overlooked your drugs, and I've overlooked your bad mouthing other people, but no one starts a fight in my club. No One!" He turned to go back into the club.

"Don't turn your back on me!" the woman shrieked. "No one turns their back on me!"

"That's it, Kat! You're banned from Industrial -- for ever! I never want to see your face here again. And yes, I am turning my back on you."

And he did.

With a scream she threw herself on his back and clawed at his face.

The bouncer? owner? grabbed a hand as it sped towards his face and peeled her off his back like so much chaff. "Beat it, Kat," he told her, "You're over." He was back inside the club by the time the woman had pulled herself off the pavement in the parking lot. "Aaaaagh!" she screamed a couple times stomping her feet. She looked around for something to throw but the parking lot was too clean. Finally she tore the sunglasses off her hair and heaved the ineffectually at the heavy door to the club. When she stomped off along the street.

"You think that's her?" Turner asked with a chuckle. "Talk about a woman with an anger issue."

"What has she done to Danny?" Jazz murmured. She handed the binoculars back to Sam now that all the excitement was over. "With a temper like that I'm scared to think." She reached for the keys hanging from the ignition switch.

"We can't following her in this car," Sam said, catching hold of Jazz's hand. "She's walking. It would way to suspicious to have a car following her all the way back to where ever she's going."

"I'll leave the headlights off. She won't see us."

"Street lights! She'll still see us."

"I'll drive past her, park and wait to see where she goes."

"Jazz, don't you think that would be pretty strange, too? We've got to follow her on foot."

"And leave my car here? Look at this place. If Danny weren't in trouble I wouldn't come within a mile of this place. If I leave my car here it won't be here when we come back for it."

With an angry grunt, Sam opened her door. "Fine, do what you want. I'm following her. Stay out of sight. Tucker, you coming?" But she didn't wait for an answer, Sam Manson was already sprinting down the street to catch up with the other woman.

***

Sam was beginning to be impressed by the woman's stamina as they made the turn at the Real Estate building into the industrial park a half hour later. She'd seen the aging Chevette drive past them a couple minutes after she left. Tucker still inside. She's noticed it on a side street several blocks later.

Sam was keeping across the street from the former member of the Extreme Ghost Breakers and at least a block back. Sam ran from doorway to alley to doorway, keeping out of sight as much as she could. As near as she could tell Kat Bowen had shown no signs of noticing her.

It was another miles of walking before Kat stopped before the gates of an old warehouse and fitted a key she took from a lanyard around her neck into a lock there. A smaller, man-sized gate beside the truck gates opened up and she slipped inside. Sam, hiding behind a tree near-by pulled out her cell phone and called Tucker and give him directions to where she was. Jazz must have been following close by because it wasn't more than five minutes later that the Chevette rattled up to a stop beside her.

"She's in there," Sam said, pointing. "It looks like the place is all locked up. I don't know how we're going to get in there."

"We could use Danny about now," Tucker said. "He could go all ghost and float right through that fence."

"But we don't have Danny, you doofus!" Sam snapped. "We're here to rescue him, remember?"

Jazz walked around to the back of her car and unlocked the hatch. "Here, arm yourselves," she said, handing out rather large plastic guns that looked like high pressure water cannons, but since the had the word "Fenton" printed in their side it was pretty fair to guess that they could blow holes through things."

"You came armed?" Tucker mused as he inspected the Fenton Cannon.

"Did you think this kidnaper was just going to let Danny go because we asked her to? Of course I came armed. Now what's the best way to get through the gate? I've got a bolt cutter, an electric saw and a small acetyl torch."

"Let's take all three," Sam suggested. "Who know what we'll need once we get inside."

"Is that a folding ladder?" Tucker asked looking at what else was in the little car's trunk.

"It's only six feet ..."

"Do you have a blanket?" Tucker asked. "We can throw the blanket over the barbed wire at the top of the fence and drop to the ground. It'll get us past the gate with less noise."

"How will we get out later? That's why I wanted to cut the gate," Jazz whispered back.

"We'll worry about that later. We've got to get Danny first," Sam said.

They all gasped them as lights snapped on in the middle of the building, throwing out rays of lights from the building's skylights. They grabbed everything and sprinted across the street to the fence.


	3. Chapter 3

The overhead lights snapping on woke Danny with a start. He scrambled to his feet surprised that he had fallen asleep given his situation. His captor stalked through the room not looking at him, muttering under her breath what sounded like an endless repetition of a single curse word. Danny wondered what could have set her so badly.

She looked like she was dressed for a night on the town, tight, black pants, a silky lavender blouse with black bead earrings and necklace. Her hair was gelled up and twisted into hundreds of little spikes. Her feet, now sticking out from under the console of another of the glass cylinder devices were in high heeled ankle high boots of the kind that his sister often looked at in the mall, would make some disparaging remark and walk away, only to stop and look at them again the next time she passed the store.

Thinking of his sister filled Danny with depression. Like most little brothers he found his sister an annoying buttinski but also an intimate part of his life, like one's mother or father, but unlike one's parents, an older sister was also a peer, someone one could yell back at, complain about and openly respond to. It's hard to see that as love, but the thought that he wouldn't see Jazz, or Sam, Tucker or his parents again because his captor was planning to kill him was more than he could bear. He beat against the glass wall of his prison which only to set off the alarms and getting him shock for his effort.

In a desperate rage, he changed to Danny Phantom and again attacked the cylinder. When all his pounding, ecto-plasmic blasts and intangibility efforts failed, Danny sucked in his breath and let go of his Ghostly Wail. The profoundly powerful vibrations hit the glass walls -- only to bounce off. They echoed back at Danny, driving him to his knees. As so often was the case, Danny passed out momentarily from using the Wail and woke to find himself a naked Danny Fenton. Discouragingly, all his efforts hadn't disturbed at all the girl working under the other cylinder device.

Perhaps because she was still cursing up a stream. Instead of a monotonous "frick, frick, frick," she was now interspersing them with the occasional "'ouch', 'damn', and 'crap.'" A small motherboard with a half-dozen dangling cables suddenly fly across the room to smash against the brick wall. A screwdriver followed a moment later.

"You'll never get anything finished like that," Danny comment, then had to laugh when he realized that he had not only repeated something his mother frequently told him, but said it in her own cadence. It was true, you really do turn into your parents!

The girl scrambled out from under the device to paw for another screwdriver and sub-assembly. She paused to tell Danny to do something impossible.

"I'm just saying," Danny said, ignoring her suggestion. "Dad always told me that when you lose your temper with machines its time to walk away. Because you're going to make some kind of mistake that going to blow up in your face. He was right, you know. One time, I got so mad trying to take apart a Fenton Finder I just slammed a screwdriver into it. Hit one of the capacitors. Fully charged. It threw me across the room. Took half a day before feeling returned to my fingertips. True story."

It was too. Of course Danny had been jury-rigging all the Fenton Finders in the house to not pick up his specific spectral vibration and not actually helping his father with anything. Also it had been his mother who had told him about walking away when one becomes too angry. Sadly, this was one lesson his father, Jack Fenton had still not learned.

Danny hadn't considered any strategic advantage when he'd said his father had given him that advice. He was just a boy who liked his father but the effect on Kat Bowen was total.

"Your father," she snarled, "is a big, fat, idiot who couldn't find his way out of a paper bag even if he had a map."

"Hey! That's my father you're talking about."

"It sucks to be you, doesn't it!" and with a laugh she ducked under the console where half a minute later she screamed then came out sucking a bleeding finger. "Not a word out of you, ghost boy," she snapped as she went over to an old first aid station mounted near the doorway.

She bandaged her finger was went back to the machine she was working on. Instead of getting back under it she opened the purse she'd thrown on the console top when she'd first come in and pulled out an inhaler. She took a couple puffs from them, shaking her head violently after each hit. She smiled for a moment then dug in her purse again for a pill box, shook out a couple small tablets and swallowed them without water. She looked at her hand trembling, apparently a reaction to one of the things she'd taken and dug out a different pill bottle and took something fro it.

"geeze, lady, how many drugs are you on?" Danny asked

"None of your business."

"I'm just saying, you know, this might not be the best time to mess up your body with drugs."

"It's my body and I'll do with it whatever I want to, OK? Why should you care? You're going to be dead in a few minutes, anyway!"

Danny slumped down in his prison, acutely aware of what she said. He was going to die if he couldn't find some way out of this prison, or if he couldn't talk her out of doing what she was doing.

"Have you ever considered that maybe its just the drugs speaking?" he asked. "Maybe if you stayed off the drugs, you know, things might not look so bad?" Danny suppressed the smile he felt coming to his lips. This was right out of one of those high school videos they were always showing in health class. Those heart-to-heart talks always worked there. She looked like someone who would respond to a little sympathy.

"Go to hell!" Kat Bowen advised him.

"You don't really want to kill anybody..."

"Yes I do!" the girl interrupted. "I want to kill them slow and painfully. I want them to look into my eyes with their last dying breathe and ask 'why?' so I can tell them, 'cause I'm not a 'dude,' dude! I want them to know my pain!"

"Are they, seriously, people who could know other people's pain?"

"I'll take what I can get, as long as they end up dead!"

"After you kill them, then what?" Danny was floundering since his high school self-help video idea had collapsed under him. "How are you going to live with yourself knowing that you killed a couple guys?"

"I'll feel fricking great!"

"God, you're crazy..."

"Of course I'm crazy," the girl laughed. "I told you that before. "I'm plumb fricking crazy. I've thought long and hard about this. Crazy was the only way forward."

She paused to flip a switch on the console. All the lights came on, some blinking through a sequence of colors before settling on green. She seemed satisfied with everything. "And now, my little turtledove.....it's show time!" She laughed as she sat down and directed an over-head crane to move over the glass cylinder mounted on her console and drop a hook that met and snapped onto a loop in the cylinder's top. A push of another button caused a hiss of pneumatics and faint pops as the clamps on the base of her cylinder released. Slowly the crane lifted the cylinder high enough to her to stand on the bottom of the enclosure.

The girl stood up. Her hands went to her ears and removed the several earrings and stubs there, dropping them on the top of the console. A necklace and a belly button piercing followed. She swept her hands over her face, apparently looking for any other studs or piercing in her face. Satisfied with that, she gathered the bottom of her shirt and pulled it over her head. She dropped it on the table then reached behind her for the hooks in her bra.

"Hey! What are you doing?"

"Getting right." she answered.

"Why are you taking off your clothes?"

"So they won't interfere with the transference."

"Clothes has nothing to do with it. You don't have to take your clothes off. You didn't have to take my clothes off. You don't even have to do this. Look I could beat your ex-partner's up and pretend to be you. That'll teach them a lesson in sexual harassment and no one has to die."

She dropped her fancy stiletto shoes to the floor and reached for the zipper of her slacks.

"Please, if I'm going to die, I don't want to the last thing I see to be your fat ass..."

"Hey, this is choice material here," she snarled, slapping one cheek loudly. "People have fought to get their hands on this!"

"Oh, lord," Danny groaned and turned away.

After a moment he heard her call out, "Computer, voice command mode 'on.'

A synthesized voice responded "Voice command mode initiated."

"Identity check."

"Voice identify as Kat Bowen."

Initiate ghost transfer procedure."

"Ghost Transfer Procedure initiated."

Danny braced himself for who knew what but the computer slowly worked its way through a long number of steps. Lower the cylinder; securing the cylinder; charging capacitors, warming up this or that device. Danny found himself thinking about the people he'd miss when he was die.

A burning, incinerating blast of electricity snapped through a cylinder Danny was in. Pain blotted out all thought. Pain so intense that he couldn't breath, wasn't sure his heart was even pumping. He could faintly smell his flesh singeing. With a spastic convulsion his muscles lost all control and he fell in a flop to the bottom of his prison. As he blacked out he could feel himself being torn atom from atom.

****

Bolt-cutters had opened a gap through the fence surrounding the deserted factory. An electric saw had cut through the deadbolt of the door leading into the lighted build. Jazz had fretted that the noise would attract someone. It hadn't.

They had raced through the building looking for the room with all the lights. It was the sound of breaking glass that brought them to the right place. The room was cluttered with a scattering of packing crate surrounding three odd-looking machines. Heavy steel benches lined the walls. One of the odd machines looked half finished, another had a six foot tall glowing glass tube like some kind of giant neon light stacked on top of it. The third was much like the second except that a tall form in a skintight black jumpsuit was climbing out of the wreckage of the glass tube. The person was tall, with snow-white hair, somewhat shaggy in length, glowing green eyes and an angular face not unlike Danny's, but older and crueler looking. There was a large stylized "D" on the chest.

"Oh, Lord, no!" Tucker groaned. "It's Dark Danny. He got loose!" Wild-eyed, Tucker threw himself behind one of the packing crates. Cautiously he looked around the wooden box to see if the creature had noticed him. Dark Danny was a survival from an aborted reality ten years in the future. He was what Danny could have become if he had lost all humanity. Dark Danny was mean, cruel and vindictive. And ten times more powerful than Danny was now. And supposedly a prisoner inside a Fenton Thermo stored deep inside the Ghost zone.

"That's not Dark Danny," Sam called from the packing crate next to his."That's a woman."

"Dark Danny's a woman?"

"No, that's probably Kat Bowen with Danny's powers."

The corner of packing crate Tucker had ducked behind exploded. His glasses protected his eyes from the burst of splinters but he could feel a bunch of them sticking in the rest of his face.

"What's she trying to do?" Tucker complained as he pulled one or two of the longer splinter from put of his cheek.

"Trying to kill us, dontcha think?" Sam replied

Tucker looked at the Fenton lipstick blaster he had been carrying and pocketed it. The Fenton lipstick was a surprisingly power blaster built inside a standard tube of lipstick. It was light, maneuverable and, with practice, very accurate. "We're going to need bigger guns," Tuck muttered as he slipped off the MK1 blaster off his shoulder. Jazz had brought it along from the Fenton's Weapons Vault. His first shot caught the ghost woman right in the middle of the "D", knocking her to the floor but she instantly bounced back up, looking unhurt. Tucker gulped. "Doing a dang good job, if you ask me," Tucker muttered.

Sam popped up from behind her packing crate and fired a couple rounds as well. Tucker noticed that instead of her usual goop gun, Sam was sporting a Mk1 as well.

"I thought you didn't believe in hurting ghosts?" he asked as more of his shelter was blown away by the mad woman with Danny's ghost's powers.

"For Danny I'm willing to make an exception."

Jazz made a dash from the work bench she's jumped behind to Tucker's packing crate. "What's going on?" she demanded. "Where's Danny?"

"I'm more thinking how are we going to get out of here alive."

"I'm not leaving without Danny," Jazz replied.

"Well, I don't see him and if we don't get out of here quick, I don't think we're going to get out of here at all."

"Sam?" Jazz called across to her.

"I'm staying till we find Danny."

"He could be anywhere," Tucker argued.

"He has to be here," Jazz countered. "It looks like Bowen just stole his powers. She doesn't seem to know how to use them yet. So Danny has to be close by."

Jazz had been pulling parts out of various pockets in her shirt, pants and jacket and snapping them together. When she finished she was holding a rifle-like device at least twice as large as the Mk1 blaster. She stood up and snapped a shot at the Ghost Woman The shot slammed the ghost woman against the far wall of the room, scorching the paint off the bricks around her. Jazz watched in amazement as the ghost woman seemed to blur for a moment, throwing off two shadows, one of a tall, twenty-something woman and the other a much smaller and definitely male boy.

Tucker threw himself at Jazz's knees knocking her to the floor just as the ghost woman recovered and fired an ecto-blast in her direction. They both scrambled for cover at the woman suddenly flew across the room.

"I can fly!" she laughed. "I can blow things up with a thought. I'm like a God!"

"Then thank goodness I'm an Atheist!" Sam answered, standing up to unleash a long burst from her gun. The woman staggered under the impacts and dropped to the floor.

"You're on my list girly!" the Ghost Woman grunted between clenched teeth.

But Sam had dodged from behind her protective packing crate to the device with the man-sized glowing tube. "Danny!" she called. "He's in here!"

The huddled thing on the floor of the cylinder stirred. Danny's dark hair lifted. He gazed at her with unfocused eyes. "Sa--" he whispered before his head fell back down.

"What did you do to him!" she screamed and fired another round at the Ghost Woman.

Jazz and Tucker race up to join Sam. "What is this?" Tucker asked.

"Obviously, it's some kind of extraction device to suck Danny's ghost powers out of him and feed it to someone else." Jazz replied.

"Obviously?" Tucker echoed dubiously. A blast from the ghost woman made them all duck behind the machine.

"Can we reverse it?" Sam asked.

"Hardly," Tucker said, "she broke the other machine when she got out."

"Can we get Danny out of here?" Sam insisted.

"Maybe. Let me have a look at these controls."

"Hurry up. Danny doesn't look well."

"I think he's dying." Jazz whispered.

"Damn it!" Sam cursed. "Help me find something to break this glass." She scuttled along the floor looking at various broken timbers and boards. Nothing looked big enough or strong enough for the task.

"Sam, get back here," Tucker ordered. "I think we've got to shut down this machine before we try to get Danny out of there. Yiiips! Someone give me some cover!" A blast from the Ghost Woman had scored a burnt furrow on the console near his hands.

Jazz stood up and took another shot, hitting the woman again on the chest. Again she was blown against the far wall of the room they were in. Again there was the strange impression that for that instant the ghost woman had split in two.

Sam was wresting with a length of 2 by 4 from one of the blown up packing crates. She finally pulled loose a three foot length which she leaned against the console Tucker was working on. "Just in case,"

Jazz had moved some distance away from Tucker, seeking shelter behind a steel workbench pushed up against a wall. The ghost woman would have to either attack her or Tucker but not could not do both. Sam ran to join her.

"You've got to call your parents," Sam said as she slide in beside Danny's sister.

"I can't call them, then they'll know."

"If you don't call them Danny will die. We don't have a choice."

"I...."

"It's too late to hope to protect Danny's secret. We've got to keep him alive."

"They're too far away," Jazz protested.

"The way your father drives?" Sam scoffed. "If you tell them Danny was attacked by a ghost they'll be here in under five minutes! Look, your father's a lot smarter than all of us combined. He could figure out that machine and reverse whatever it did to Danny in no time."

"But...."

"It's Danny's only hope."

They'd been taking turns popping up and firing at the Ghost Woman keeping her too distracted and pinned down by gun fire to do more than hover in one corner of the factory room and send occasional ecto-plasm blasts their way.

"I don't th -- think Danny has five minutes," Jazz choked out. "We've got to think of something now, before he -- he --" Jazz couldn't bring herself to finish her sentence. "She's learning, too. I think that last time she almost deflected my rifle blast. We can't let her learn how to use Danny's powers."

"Right." Sam had a strange look in her eye but before Jazz could ask what she planned to do, Sam jumped up screaming "Die you miserable son of a ...." the rest was lost in an endless scream as the Goth girl charged straight for Kat Bowen, pouring out a continue stream of blaster fire,

"Sam, no!" Jazz cried, then jumped up to add her weapon's fire to Sam's.

Sam got to within twenty feet of the crazy women before Kat hit her with an ectoplasm fireball. Sam was knocked off her feet and skidded on the cement floor back to where Jazz could run out and drag her behind a packing crate. Half of Sam's T-shirt was burned away. The exposed skin was reddened, blisters seemed to form even as Jazz watched. She'd kept hold of her gun though and was already struggling to her feet as Jazz tried to hold her down.

"Tucker, come here, we need you!" Jazz called.

Tucker was finding the security on the strange machine more difficult than imagined. It had taken him longer to get a command line interface open then he had even expected and then found that the command structure wasn't like anything he'd ever used before. He was just beginning to understand the command structure when Danny lifted his head. "Tuck? Is that you? Tell Sam I--" and he collapsed again.

"Don't go all weird on me, " Tucker told the unconscious boy. "We'll get you outta there."

Then Jazz called. Tucker debated whether it would be better to continue working on the machine or see what Jazz wanted. A look at the file directory convinced him to run over to Jazz.

"Keep Sam from getting herself killed," Jazz ordered.

"She won't call their parents," Sam complained.

"What's that got to do..." Tucker began, then throw himself on Sam when she started to run down the aisle again.

Kat was able to dodge most of Sam's blaster fire this time, showing a mobility in flight she hadn't had a few minutes before. But she was so busy dancing around Sam's shots that she didn't notice Jazz standing up, carefully aiming and letting rip with a half dozen bursts. The heavy rounds of the Mk2 blaster caught her once again in the chest. Not only did it blow her back to the far wall of the building but again there was that split image, one decidedly smaller than the other.

Jazz squatted down and pulled out a thick cylinder from a back pocket. She opened up a sleeve of the blaster, ejected the cylinder that was in it and inserted the new one. "Either of you guys pick up extra batteries for your blasters?" she asked.

"Call your parents!" Sam insisted.

"Does she always split up when you hit her with your blaster?" Tucker asked.

"I think."

"But why? I've been Danny get hit by ectoplasm lots of time and he's never done anything like that."

"Of course, that's it! She's got Danny's powers but she's not Danny, right. So I don't think Danny's powers have actually integrated with her. I think if we hit here with all our blaster power at the same time we might be able to force Danny's ghost powers out of her body."

"Then what. It's been just going back to her. We've got to make it go back to Danny."

"I know how to take care of that," Sam exclaimed and jumped up before the others could react. She dashed back to the machine holding Danny and grabbing the two by four smashed the glass tube he was in. Danny groaned as the broken shards feel on him but was too weak to move.

Kat Bowen swooped down towards Sam with an evil grin on her lips. She was forming a huge ball of plasm she obviously intended to drop on Sam but blaster fire from Jazz and Tucker knocked her off her course. Reflectively she threw the ectoplasm at them, forcing them to dive out of its way. Before she could form another plasma ball Sam had her gun up and was pumping fire in her direction.

Jazz and Tucker joined her. Caught in a cross-fire Kat found herself unable to move in any direction that didn't make the attacked fire worse. She tried to draw up a shielding wall, She'd seen ghosts do this before and finally had figured out how to extrude the ecto-energy from her body to make the screen. But the charges from the big Mk2 blaster just ripped right through her screen. And then something seemed to go wrong.

Pain wracked her body. Her movements became heavy, leaden. She forced herself to pull up more energy from where these ghost powers came from. And every time she did so it seemed like something was ripping in her body. She felt a power rippling up from her body and out her throat. She opened her mouth to scream but all that came out was a racking smoker's cough. Lights flashed before her eyes, then winked out. She fell to the floor with a sickening thud!

Jazz, Sam and Tuck stopped their firing when Kat Bowen fell out of the air. Behind she left a hovering shadow, a formless form, that roiled and spun on itself for a moment then drifted over to the center of the room where Danny lay in a pile of broken glass, as still as death. The shadow seemed to pass over him, or maybe it just evaporated under the brighter lights in the middle of the room. It was gone just like that.

Jazz, holding her blaster at ready slowly walked over to where Kat Bowen had fallen. The woman lay crumpled on the floor like a naked rag doll. Jazz pushed her with her foot and Kat moaned weakly. Satisfied that the crazy woman wasn't a threat she joined Sam and Tucker who were lifting Danny out of the wreckage of the machine. Tucker was starting to pull out some of the larger shards of glass while Sam, spying an abandoned blouse on the floor, pulled it over her ruined T-shirt.

"Is he?" Jazz whispered.

But before Tucker could answer Danny groaned and sat up. "What happened?"

With a cry Jazz gathered Danny up in a big hug, then leaped back with a "Eeeew. What happened to your clothes?" she asked.

"She must have took them off when she put me in that thing. Anyone see them? By the way, where is Kat? Did she get away?"

"She over there," Jazz pointed. "I don't think she's doing well. We've got to call 911 and get am ambulance." She reached into her pants for her cell phone.

"Don't bother, an ambulance won't help her," Danny said with surprising certainty. "Wow. It's like I remember everything she did while she had my ghost powers. Something happened when she lost those powers. Like what happened to me when she took my powers away. It's like some vital spark has gone out of her. Without it she'll die, but I don't know how to get it back in."

A wad of clothes fell on his lap. Danny looked up to see Sam coming back from the corner of the room where she had found them. "Thanks. But I've got a better idea," he said.

Danny concentrated for a moment, longer than it usuaully took him to change. Then abruptly a ring of light sprang from his waist, split in two and raced to either end of his body. As they moved he changed from naked Danny Fenton to clothed Danny Phantom. "Yes!" he exclaimed. "I can still change!"

"You thought you couldn't?" Tucker asked.

"I wasn't sure. I know my powers came back to me. I can feel their energy but I wasn't sure I could still control it. He floated into the air, did a somersault, turned invisible and fly through a packing crate, testing out his powers.

"Just like that you were inches from death and now it's like nothing happened?" Sam groused somewhat uncharitably since she was hurting a lot from the second degree burns on her chest.

"I feel like I got hit by a truck, Sam.. I feel like I could sleep for a week, but, yeah, I feel OK. Are you all right? You don't look so good?"

"Thanks for noticing. Just a little collateral damage..."

"We've got to get you to a hospital!"

"What about Bowen?" Tucker reminded them. "Are we just going to leave her to die?"

"Oh shoot! Danny exclaimed and flew over to where the former Extreme Ghostbreaker lay on the floor. He winced at the extent of her injuries.

"If an ambulance can't help her, what are we going to do?" Jazz asked as she joined her brother.

Before he could answer there was a faint sounding "Hey!" Danny looked down to see Kat Bowen's eyes were open. But the dying woman wasn't looking at him. Her eyes were focused on Sam. "That's my shirt, you bi--!" Her eyes closed and she began coughing harshly.

Sam whipped off the lavender blouse and threw it at the woman. "Take it!" She snarled. She then grabbed the T-shirt out of the pile of clothes Danny was still holding and pulled it over her own ruined T-shirt.

"I've got an idea." Danny turned to Tucker, "Can you rig this stuff to blow up?"

"A Few short circuits should do the trick."

"Good, this stuff shouldn't be left lying around." He stooped and piled up the woman, who moaned painfully as he moved her. "I'll meet you back at the house."

"Danny, Sam and Tucker both need to go to the ER. You do too."

"House. I'm too tired to argue." And Danny slowly flew up through the roof of the old factory and was gone.

"Great," Jazz said. Tucker was already lying under the extraction machine Danny had been in, working on it. "How big of an explosion do you think that thing will make?"

"More than an M-80 and less than a stick of dynamite." Tucker said from under the console.

"How does he know this stuff?" Sam wondered, pulling the front of Danny's T-short away from her chest. "When was the last time Danny washed his clothes?" she asked.

"Who knows," Jazz said, rolling her eyes. "OK, here's the plan. Once the fire's started we phone it into the police than go County General Hospital for Sam's burns and Tucker's splinters. We were looking for Danny. You two were walking by when the building exploded. You called me. I called 911 and drove you to the ER."

"The explosion isn't going to be that big," Tucker objected. "It won't reach the street."

"That's not important. Our story is we were hurt in an explosion and there will be an explosion to confirm our story. I don't think anyone is going to look much deeper into it than that."

"Jazz you are way too glib for your own good," Sam said.

Tucker slid out from under the machine. "Should be two to five minutes for the capacitors to blow."

"Do we have to wait for the explosion?" Sam continued. "I'm beginning to think this shirt is rancid."

They raced out of the building.

***

"What are you doing?" Kat whispered as Danny flow over the city back to FentonWorks and his parent's Ghost Portal.

"Trying to save your life."

"Why bother. I'm effed up everything I've ever done in life. I couldn't even do a good job of killing one kid."

Danny wasn't sure how to answer something like that so he let it ride.

"Go ahead, say it," she continued. "I don't mind."

Danny had no idea what she expected him to say.

"Say it," she persisted. "I know you want to."

"Say what?"

"I told you so."

"I wasn't going to."

"Why not? It's true. You said the drugs would eff me up and they did. You said clothes didn't matter and here I am dying in my birthday suit...."

"Save your strength. I'm trying to save you."

"They all say that, the boys; but in the end none of them ever really do...." her voice faded away. Her eyes closed, her head lolled back.

They flew silently for a couple minutes. Then her eyes popped open as a long groan oozed from her mouth. "Who knew dying could hurt so much."

"Hang in there. We're almost there."

Danny had seen the twenty foot high neon "FentonWorks" sign in the distance. Its lights continued to blink and flash even though the rest of the building was dark. He turned intangible and flew through the walls of the brownstone building and into the basement lab. The lights were off except a couple Safety lamps. It was the middle of the night and his parents were comfortably asleep upstairs.

Danny slapped the hand-plate of the Fenton Genetic Lock, opening the shutters to the Ghost Zone Portal. Green lights swirled in an endless vortex. Occasionally structures would momentarily appear, then fade out. What they were or what they meant no one knew. The Ghost Zone Portal was a cylinder thirty feet long in this world, surrounded by machinery at least five feet deep. But the interface itself. The division between being in the normal universe and being in the Ghost Zone was a plane of zero dimensions. Danny slipped through it feeling the usual twisting forces as he did so.

And then he was there. The zone was an endless sky. Over there to one side were row after row of floating doors, in the other direction was where islands floated. The portal itself was anchored to one of the floating islands. Here it was just a floating disk of twisted green light, a rip in space and time. Over time Danny had contrived to disguise the Portal somewhat by bringing in rocks and trees to cover the rip in space. He had left space enough, of course, to bring the Specter Speeder through but on the whole, if a ghost didn't know where the portal was they would have a hard time finding it.

He laid the limp girl on the ground and waited.

After a moment she opened her eyes; looked around, then stood up. She was stretching stiff limbs when she looked down -- and screamed.

Kat Bowen was still laying on the ground.

She threw herself at Danny. "What did you do to me!" she screamed as she tried to get her hands around his neck.

Danny pushed her off. "I saved your life."

"Do I look alive?" She pointed to the body lying on the ground.

"Yes. As alive as you'll ever be." Danny replied. "That's not you on the ground. That's what you were. Now you're like everyone here, a ghost. I couldn't save your body but I thought if I could get you here while you were still alive I could at least save you."

Kat Bowen paced around the small space in front of the portal, shaking her head in denial. "I'm freaking out. That's it, I'm freaking out. I need some Valium. I can't be dead." she said over and over.

"Kat.-- Kat -- Dude! Listen to me." At the sound of the hated word the woman stopped paced and glared at Danny.

"There was nothing I could do to save your body. I don't understand all this myself. Mostly I'm going on guesses and vague memories that must have come from you when you had my ghost powers. But when you took my ghost powers I felt you rip something else from my body, something I must need to live because the minute that happened I could feel myself dying. I didn't have any strength. I could hardly think or breath or move. Then when my friends rescued me and my ghost powers came back so did that other thing and suddenly I felt well, strong -- well, not that strong. I felt like I'd been ran over by a train, but I wasn't dying.

"I think there must be some kind of -- I don't know, call it an astral body, that each of us has. But it holds us together. It makes the nerves work, or something. I'm sure my Dad could explain this a lot better. He's the genius in the family. I'm just a kid with freak powers.

"Anyway: I think that's why you couldn't fuse with my ghost powers -- they were still attached to my astral body, and when my friends broke the containment field around that glass cylinder you had me in, my astral body, or whatever, snapped back to me like a rubber band, and dragged my ghost powers back as well. But because you had partly fused with my ghost powers your astral body got ripped from your body. I don't know why it didn't just snap back to your body like mine did for me. Maybe it was damaged. Maybe those drugs you were taking changed your body in a way that your astral body couldn't handle. Maybe my astral body has more experience going from ghost to normal and back. I don't know but I did know that the moment I looked at you I could sort of see your astral body - maybe it's a larval ghost thing - but I could see it hanging around outside your body and slowly getting weaker. I knew and I don't know why, that you would die if that astral body didn't get back into your body and without your body the astral body would fade away too. Then I thought, that if I could get you here, before your body died, maybe your astral self could draw enough energy from the ghost dimension to survive. It was a long shot except that I was as certain it would work as I was certain that nothing on earth would keep you alive. So I brought you here."

"What am I supposed to do here?"

"I don't know. Make friends? The Ghost Zone isn't uninhabited. Though I suppose most of them are a lot like you, self-centered, vengeful...."

"I'm supposed to be happy about this? You've marooned me in stinking nowhere!"

"It's better than being dead, isn't it?"

"You think? You think? I'd rather be dead than stuck here!"

"I'm sorry. There's no way back. If you ever re-enter the Earth zone your astral body will disintegrate. There's nothing to hold it together."

"Don't count on it, Danny Phantom. I'll find a way. I'm a lot smarter than you think. I'll find a way make to Earth and I'll make you pay! You and your little dog too!" She started cackling crazily before it turned into sobs.

"Great, another enemy," Danny sighed, then lifted off and flew back through the portal, slapping the close button as he passed. Silently but empathetically, the shutters closed.


End file.
